Author Archives: Jocelyn

On the day Allegra and I eyeballed the various exercise stations filling the usually open expanse of the third floor of the Y, it had been months since I’d last attended the Boot Camp class. Some of the stations looked familiar. Yup, I’d held the ends of the big ropes in my hands before and […]

Ridiculous, irrational frettings that keep me awake from 4:00-7:30 a.m. even after I went to bed at 2:00 a.m.: 1. The PR lady at the college thinks my name is Joyce, and I hate the name Joyce, and so maybe I should email her and tell her. Except I’m so overwrought due to lack of […]

When Byron goes to bed each night, I shift into “all the world falls away” mode. The house sleeps, yet my party continues. Some nights this means I work on a jigsaw; other night it means I catch up on celebrity gossip; and sometimes this means I watch a show that I know Byron wouldn’t […]

It’s the darkness that distinguishes it. Playing outside during daylight was so commonplace as to blur, in the faint murmurs of memory, into nothingness. Being out of the house under radiant sun just meant another Saturday, another round of mud patties slapped together while perched on the curb, leaning over the gutter. If it was […]

It’s that time again: students in my advanced composition class are choosing topics for their research papers. While there is a whole sheet of instructions that I give to them, there are a few bulleted “big” points that I want to really drive home for them as they rev up and get going with their […]

I can’t spot him. Where is he? Byron already pointed him out, his curly blonde hair below the Exit sign, and we’re not that far away, so why can’t I find my kid? Ah, there! Paco’s head pops up. I can just make out his profile, his head small from this distance, his body invisible […]

And I’d been sleeping so deeply, too. But then came the moment when my bladder was so full my brain started to surface, and my body’s first impulse, a sort of readying itself to stand, was to roll over. Holy mother of lightning in the fascia. Pain radiated from seven different places in my right […]

Representation matters. Messaging matters. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. These ads, half of them drawn from my mom’s formative years of the 1950s, the other half drawn from my formative years of the 1980s, tell a story about the values and expectations that shaped us. If we are willing to accept that […]

1. Needing to choose a topic for a research paper in English class, Paco asks for ideas. It’s not so much that he will accept any of our ideas but more that he needs to go through the process of hearing and discarding them so that he can feel increasingly certain the topic he already […]

Watching a Nova documentary about the ruins of Petra in Jordan reminded me that my idea of heaven, if I get to write that script, is this: for all of eternity, I will be reclining a third of the way back in a movie theater, a naturally refilling Large popcorn on my lap, watching reels […]